2024 was the year we turned questions into breakthroughs, discovering the transformative power of personalized scholarship-giving.

What began with tough questions from 2023, ended with finding our way to insightful answers. Our confidence in our mission’s viability and impact only grew stronger.

Every start up journey has its unique turns. I’ve realised it makes as much for interesting reflection as it does for experience.

I’m sharing mine from 2024 and hope it helps you consider the questions in your life and how you intend to resolve them.

For Impactis, I’m excited to share our progress, our learnings and goals for the future, and invite your support in key areas of our mission.

Impactis’ mission is to make scholarship-giving “feel good”.

We’re helping affluent professionals to uniquely express their personality, perspective and impact, in ways that gives deserving students, the inspiration, guidance and funding to pursue better and bolder careers.

Scholarship-giving when woven into one’s own life experiences have the power to reinforce the magic of strangers helping each other, and mitigating the despair of the under-served of not having an opportunity for a better future.

Impactis is giving in our hands a chance to make the world a better place.

Last year began with unanswered questions around customers and viability:

1. Who is our customer?

2023 was riddled with experiments with various scholarship-giving customer categories but remaining frustrated by a lack of clarity. However, unknown to us then, it was preparing us with unique insights to better interpret what was to unravel in 2024.

2. Can this be viable?

We knew well that knowing our customer was just the first step. To build and scale to our vision, we also needed to address a few more critical questions:

• What can we earn?
• What will it cost?
• How will this grow?

This context laid the groundwork for 2024.

By the end of 2024, we had not only addressed these questions but also built a foundation of confidence for the future.

Hello Customer!

Our experiments yielded the discovery of a large customer base that could help us grow right:

1. A meaningful profile: Mass-affluent professionals with a high degree of acquired world wisdom are not just valuable customers; they are collaborators who help us build a better product.

Talking with them unveiled exactly what we had been missing during our experiments in 2023, something we could appreciate after the initial failures.

2. Every customer paid: They validated the value of our offering. Disregarding conventional wisdom, we intentionally stayed away from onboarding friends and family. Each customer was won on value.

3. Quick Acquisition: Early-user customers signed up within days and weeks.

4. Upselling success: A significant share of our customers has already opted to upsell.

5. Untapped potential: We estimate that we’re currently touching less than 0.5% of our early users’ earning capacity, and we haven’t even started pursuing referrals. This presents a massive runway for organic growth as we now double down on servicing and delivering delight.

6. Need Discovery & Solutions: Serving these initial few, we quickly learnt that personalized scholarship-giving today doesn’t have credible benchmarks for experience anywhere. Finding and setting these benchmarks occupied much of our 2024.

I Can See You Mr. Costs

Understanding costs has been another major milestone:

1. Scaling student acquisition: Finding, verifying and matching students viably at scale was initially our biggest concern. Today, we’re confident that our model can viably scale to the next 100,000 verified students in India, with path for wider expansion and improvements, providing a solid foundation for sustained growth.

2. Economies of scale: Agreements with NGOs like Bhumi and YDF have shown us that both efficiency and mutual value will improve significantly with scale, giving us a clear direction for growth.

These tie-ups also helped our scholarship-giving customers in the US and India to get up to 22% in real tax benefits.

3. Unanswered cost questions: While we’ve made significant progress, there are a few areas we’re still exploring, and which form key focus areas for 2025.

There’s My Partner!

Our experiments with corporate partnerships yielded remarkable and telling results:

1. Valuable partnerships: In under a year, we signed nearly 10 companies, including Salesforce, Standard Chartered and Cognizant, for verified employee volunteering to evaluate students and provide guidance.

2. Impactful reach: These partnerships resulted in over 25,000 evaluations by 1,500 volunteers, totaling an impressive 2,000 hours of their time, and significantly improving our ability to support and guide students.

For context, established foundations manage between 5,000-7,000 volunteer hours after 10-15 years of effort. We achieved our numbers in experiment-mode! It’s a testament to the scalability of our compelling online model.

3. Salesforce campaign: Early evidence validates immense potential and demand beyond volunteering. Positive volunteer experiences at Salesforce resulted in the request for an exciting and massively successful fund campaign, with employees referring or wanting to create their own personalized scholarships or contributing to existing ones.

4. Tip of the iceberg: With unique insights and a blueprint to scale, we believe there is much more to uncover and achieve in ecosystem value-enablement and nurturing this customer acquisition and retention channel.

This journey hasn’t just been about numbers; it’s been filled with moments that reaffirm why we do what we do. Let me share a few:

“Sixth Customer” Moment

After early setbacks, signing our first few customers was a cautious victory. One day, a Stripe payment alert came in within minutes of sending an invoice. But the real highlight was reflecting on the meaningful conversations with this customer—a wise, senior professional—who revealed how deeply personal scholarship-giving could be. This was our “eureka” moment: scholarship-giving isn’t just an act; it’s an experience that should feel fulfilling.

“When They Met” Moment

We organized a first interaction between a scholarship-giver and a student from entirely different backgrounds. The student, a space enthusiast from Haryana inspired by Kalpana Chawla, connected with the giver, from Andhra Pradesh, who to our discovery had been associated to projects with ISRO. Despite language barriers, a rhythm emerged, and by the end of the call, they had built an inspiring connection. This moment underscored the profound human potential of our platform.

“Safety Net” Moment

When a scholarship recipient suffered a medical emergency, the scholarship-giver stepped in to help. Along with an NGO, the costs were finally covered together, but it highlighted the need for proactive solutions for unforeseen crises. Addressing this gap can remove barriers that might discourage scholarship-givers while ensuring greater security for students.

Moments like these are shaping our vision of Impactis as more than just a platform—it’s a stabilizing force that fosters trust and resilience on both sides.

2025 is about scaling our early validations to a thousand customers, with a few focus areas:

1. Customer Acquisition: Optimizing lead generation, conversion, and referral strategies.

2. Customer Experience at Scale: Defining and consistently delivering delight while validating its costs at larger volumes.

3. Productization: Transitioning from a service to a repeatable, tech-driven product. A critical milestone will be finding the right CTO to bring this vision to life.

A lot of doubting and second-guessing comes one’s way in a journey like ours. Sharpening our judgement and instinct is a crucial part of the process of building something worthwhile. Failures are part of the process, as is resilience. We head into 2025 armed with fortitude.

The road ahead is long and filled with opportunities to help us make greater impact, faster.

This is where you come in.

1. Intros to VCs and angel investors

We are looking to raise funds from like-minded investors to fuel our growth. If you know mission-oriented investors who share our passion for equitable education access, impact and innovation, we would love an introduction.

2. Connections with potential CTO co-founders in the Bay Area I’m personally excited to work with someone who is hands-on, already in the bay area, takes immense pride in their work, and energized by the exciting opportunities that AI brings to not only build better technology, but also an entirely new and better type of chaordic organization.

If you know someone who fits this profile, please connect us.

The world will be a better place when Impactis succeeds. By supporting us now, you help us accelerate equitable access to education, mentoring and meaningful life-experiences for scholarship-givers.

Reflecting on 2024, the frustration of 2023 feels like a distant memory. The questions that once seemed insurmountable have now become stepping stones to a brighter future.

Now, as we tackle the challenges of 2025, I’m excited to test Impactis’ ability to scale and make a lasting and meaningful impact in the world.

Thank you for being part of our journey. Look forward to your continued encouragement and support as we set out to make 2025 a year to remember!